The argument against the NBA Draft age limit – known to all as the “one-and-done” rule – is a throne of lies.

Yes, Buddy, that’s what I said.

This is not inconsequential. The avalanche of lies about the NBA’s age limit rule has colored its perception from the day it was introduced in 2005, and the overreaction has led to NCAA president Mark Emmert’s public condemnation of “one-and-done” and to NBA commissioner Adam Silver and NBA Players Association executive director Michele Roberts meeting with Emmert’s college basketball commission to discuss the future of the rule.

Since the age limit was introduced in advance of the 2006-07 college basketball season and the 2007 NBA Draft, it’s been about as welcome as a pickle in a dish of vanilla ice cream. However, the arguments mounted against it have been manufactured, distorted, false … What’s that, Buddy?

That’s right. Lies.

Every last one of them.

1. One-and-done is bad for college basketball: Lie. The persistence of this one is exhausting, because simple logic dictates having more great players in the game would automatically elevate its quality. The opportunity to watch Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, Jabari Parker and Lonzo Ball as collegians, every single one of them a first-team All-American – how did they and their peers supposedly have a negative impact?

It surely hasn’t been on the game’s popularity. In 2015, 28.3 million people watched the NCAA Championship game between Duke and Wisconsin, won by Duke and its three one-and-done freshmen (Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones, Justise Winslow). That was more than watched any title game between 1996 and 2006, the era in which players regularly advanced from high school to the NBA, save for the overtime 1997 Arizona-Kentucky game. The average title-game audience on CBS for the preps-to-pros era was 22.65 million; for the one-and-done period, it was 24.15 million.

Of the 50 highest-rated sports telecasts in the first half of 2017, NCAA basketball was responsible for 13 – more than any sport save the NFL. Yes, even more than the NBA, which had nine.

In 2017, with One-and-Doners filtering throughout the sport and supposedly ruining its appeal, 24.4 million attended Division I basketball games. In 2002, with college basketball safe from the likes of Kwame Brown, Eddy Curry and Ousmane Cisse, all of whom entered the draft out of high school, total attendance was 22 million.

There’s no reliable indicator that suggests college basketball is declining in popularity.

2. Players are “forced” to go to college: Lie. A simple Google search will provide you with perhaps a million citations indicating that NBA prospects are “forced” to attend college because of the age limit rule. You can find this error in nearly every major online sports publication, and lots of minor ones.

It’d be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. It’s terrible for our business, really, that the sports media can’t be correct on something this basic.

We can’t blame just the media, though. Sometimes we are just reporting someone else’s misinformation. Emmert said this to the New York Times as recently as last month:“A model that forces somebody to go to college who has no interest in being in college is fundamentally flawed.”

In more than a decade since the age limit was introduced, we have seen players follow any number of paths during the year they are required to wait to enter the NBA Draft. Latavious Williams tried the D-League. Some went overseas: Brandon Jennings to Italy, Emmanuel Mudiay to China and Terrance Ferguson to Australia. Thon Maker entered the draft after a year in prep school. Mitchell Robinson is spending this year training on his own.

Four of those six became first-round picks, and Robinson will enter the draft in 2018.

If players are “forced” to play in college, how did these guys escape that edict? Why was there a story this past weekend from Scout.com’s Evan Daniels about 6-3 prep school guard Anfernee Simons considering entering the draft after he finishes his year at IMG Academy next spring?

This is not a harmless slip of the language. This is a blatant falsehood being presented as truth, and it colors the public perception of the rule. Many fans I encounter are surprised to learn what is now called the “G League” is open to prospects leaving high school. It may not be as inviting as college basketball, or as rewarding, but it is there as an option for those who do not wish to play in college or depart for a more lucrative year in an overseas pro league.

3.The age limit is “un-American”: Lie. The NBA did not unilaterally impose the draft age limit upon prospective basketball players. That was something it negotiated with the NBA Players Association in the collective bargaining agreement that was announced in July 2005. It has been kept in place through two subsequent deals, the players and owners both agreeing to keep that item of the CBA in place.

Does it get any more American than a wealthy company agreeing with its workforce on the rules of employment?

What always has been curious about the outrage directed against the age limit is how incredibly out of balance it is with whatever inconvenience is created for the prospects affected. The collective bargaining agreement also allows for a player draft that forces players to live and work in communities that might not be their preference and, most egregiously, to have their early career salaries capped at a level that does not even approximate market value.

Where is the media campaign against those two requirements?

The NBA’s rookie salary scale was introduced in advance of the 1995 draft. In 1994, top pick Glenn Robinson signed a 10-year guaranteed contract worth, in 2017 dollars, $110 million. In the 2017-18 season, the scale for top pick Markelle Fultz allowed for a two-year guarantee of $12.8 million, with an option on the third year for $8.1 million. So the guarantee for top rookies has plunged by nearly 90 percent and the salary by more than 40 percent.

4.You no longer “get to know” college players: Lie. I’ll confess to allowing this one to sit there unchallenged for far too long. I never gave it much thought – until I did, and realized it was 100 percent malarkey.

Anyone who watched the 2017 NCAA Tournament might remember it was won by the team representing North Carolina – a team almost identical to the collection of Tar Heels that played in the NCAA Championship game the year before. How many times did someone need to see Joel Berry or Justin Jackson play before they “got to know” the players?

It is true the team at Kentucky essentially turns over every season, and lately that largely is true of Duke. But there are more than 350 Division I teams, and there are many consistently at the top of the game whose players routinely advance from their freshman to their senior seasons with only an occasional early entrant departing for the draft, among them: Purdue, Wichita State, Cincinnati, Virginia, Saint Mary’s, Michigan, Xavier and the most obvious example, 2016 NCAA champ Villanova.

Here is how you know it’s ludicrous to say “one-and-done” stops you from “getting to know” college players.

Over the past five years, this is the class breakdown of the starters in the national championship game: 14 seniors, 14 juniors, 15 sophomores, seven freshmen.

For the five seasons from 2000-04, right in the heart of the preps-to-pros era before the age limit was introduced, this was the breakdown: 15 seniors, 14 juniors, 16 sophomores, five freshmen.

The 2000-04 teams had one more upperclassman than the past five champs, and only two fewer freshmen. In other words, “one-and-done” has made almost no impact on fans’ ability to become familiar with players while they are in college.

It's a chore trudging through this much inanity.

5. One-and-dones are less invested in education: Lie. I’ve cited before the example of singer Josh Groban and his enrollment at Carnegie Mellon University. Groban planned to study musical theater but was offered a recording contract before he finished his first term. And that was that.

That’s not uncommon. It happens with actors majoring in theater all the time. It happened in the technology business with Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Dell, who are now worth a combined $266 billion.

This is what Emmert told the Times about one-and-dones: ““We have a model at the N.C.A.A. that’s predicated upon students wanting to be students — that they want to be college students, they want to participate in a college experience, and they want to play college basketball — and their desire to play in the NBA is subordinate to that.”

This statement is so empty it’s beyond false, and it’s beyond a fantasy. It’s an insult to the players preparing for professional basketball careers.

My desire to become a sports journalist was not subordinate to my college education. It was the reason for my college education.

Think that makes me unusual? A survey conducted of incoming college freshmen in 2015 by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA that 85 percent of students entered college for this purpose: to be able to get a better job.

One-and-dones Kevin Durant and John Wall are among those who have returned to college subsequent to entering the draft to further their educations. Basketball players should not be affronted so routinely because they want to play professionally. It's what college is about.

6. The rule was conceived for NCAA to “make money”: Lie. This is a bit less common, but it comes up enough in interactions with fans that it’s worth a moment to reject it.

Simply put: This is an NBA rule. The NBA could not have less concern with whether the NCAA makes money. The NBA does care if the NBA makes money.

Indeed, this rule helps the NBA make money because instead of the most talented prospects entering its league as virtual unknowns -- and failing at a higher rate -- those players now create enough buzz upon arrival that the NBA Summer League has become a big deal.

If people paid attention to the truth about the age limit rule, they would see it has been beneficial for basketball and basketball players at all levels of the game. It is not perfect; it might be better set at 20, and the NBA would do well to make the alternative of the G League a more comfortable option.

But former NCAA president Miles Brand, who passed away in 2009, understood the benefits of the age limit.

“If you look at the whole situation, it's actually a help to education,” he told the Houston Chronicle in 2008. He noted, “Young men now have to prepare themselves in high school in order to go to college and be eligible to play in college” if they wanted to keep that option available in advance of entering the draft.